


I Can't Quit You, Baby

by ishafel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-12
Updated: 2010-05-12
Packaged: 2017-10-09 10:21:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/86218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishafel/pseuds/ishafel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Ballad of John and the Impala.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Can't Quit You, Baby

The Impala is a gift from Mary's father--charity, really, is what it is. John doesn't want to take it. He's been driving beaters his whole life, cars only a mechanic could love. The Caddy with the broken fuel gauge, the Oldsmobile that leaks a quart of oil every two weeks. Mostly what they have going for them, is that he can afford them. The Impala's different. It's not new, but it might as well be. It's been garage-kept, perfectly maintained, barely driven. Mary's brother bought it when he graduated high school, and three days later he got drafted. There's fewer than ten thousand miles on the odometer.

He knows her father's never thought he was good enough for Mary. Maybe he isn't. The kind of man she deserves doesn't drop out of M.I.T. and join the Marines, doesn't have grease under his fingernails, can afford to buy her a safe and reliable car. So taking the Impala is like admitting to failure. But Mary's eight months pregnant, and in Kansas in December you need a car you can trust. And besides, she says please, and this gets John every time--something one of his sons learns all too well, and the other one never learns.

Mary dies and six months later her father dies, too, and John almost gets rid of the Impala then. But he's pragmatic enough--just--to keep it, as long as it runs. A man with two kids and no steady job can't afford too much pride. He'll drive it until it falls apart, he promises himself, and he has enough pride he doesn't cheat and neglect the maintenance. What kind of example would that be for his boys?

The third time he takes Dean hunting, something goes wrong. That night he's grateful for the car, for the way its rebuilt engine coughs to life when he turns the key, for its speed. He doesn't let himself think what might have happened if he'd been driving something else--the Oldsmobile that topped out at sixty or the Cadillac that didn't like damp weather. Dean's blood stains the upholstery, the carpet: it takes six months of driving with the windows open before John stops smelling it.

He teaches Dean to drive in that car, and by then he's so resigned to it he doesn't even hope Dean will wreck it. Dean is thirteen and cocky, so short he can barely see over the dashboard. John wakes him up at four am every morning for weeks, makes him drive around and around the supermarket parking lot. Two years later Dean teaches the eleven year old Sammy to drive the same way, when John's in the hospital for the three weeks with a broken pelvis and two broken legs. He must be a better teacher than John, because Sam drives like an eighty-year old grandmother and Dean drives like a New York cabdriver.

On Dean's sixteenth birthday he signs the car over. It's more Dean's than his by now anyway: Dean's the one who changes the oil, spends hours washing and waxing it. John's as glad to be giving it away as Dean is to be getting it. Dean doesn't see his Uncle Richard or his grandfather or even his mother when he looks at it. It was his father's car, and now it's his: he loves it unreservedly.


End file.
